SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on Coming on Lemmy and complaining because there are too many Linux users is like going in to a brothel and complaining that there are too many hookers 3 weeks ago:
That really hurt the elephant’s feelings to be always singled out, so no wonder.
- Comment on Trying to reverse climate change won’t save us, scientists warn 3 weeks ago:
And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)
- Comment on Honey 4 weeks ago:
Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn’t an animal body part, it isn’t produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?
- Comment on Pesto!!! 4 weeks ago:
But have we tried feeding a human infant 24kg of fish per week? Y’know, for science.
- Comment on US ports strike causes first shutdown in 50 years 1 month ago:
Glad to see that Pres. Biden isn’t (yet) forcing the workers back on the job this time. Perhaps he should mitigate the effects on the economy by temporarily nationalizing the ports for the 80-day negotiation period, and hiring the longshoremen to work them?
- Comment on Burning Up 2 months ago:
Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.
- Comment on Burning Up 2 months ago:
Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)
- Comment on Burning Up 2 months ago:
No, that’s not it, we’re measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.
“One hun-dred and se-ven?!” == 6 syllables
“For-ty one?!” == 3 syllables
Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can’t-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I’m-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.
- Comment on It's called a wedding ring, but surely it should be called a marriage ring 2 months ago:
Reminds me of an old Yakov Smirnoff routine. Espresso powder makes espresso, and milk powder makes milk. So what does baby powder make?
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 2 months ago:
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (places) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a free second at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
- Comment on Hail our true supreme leader 2 months ago:
The arms in the second image are much too short. I can’t unsee it, now that I’ve noticed.
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 3 months ago:
Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 3 months ago:
Ha, I thought that the blatant contradiction about having too much space and therefore not enough space would make the joke obvious, but I guess not.
Also, a Canyonero isn’t a real vehicle. It was a joke from The Simpsons.
- Comment on If malls continue to shut down and decay over the next twenty years, someone should turn them into retirement communities for GenX and Millennials. 3 months ago:
Yes, that’s what Europeans don’t understand about America. When we go to, say, Wal Mart, there’s only one. We have to go to Bentonville, AR. Not so bad for us here in the Midwest, but the residents of Alaska have it particularly tough. And since you go to Wal Mart to pick up milk, we can’t go by public transport. It has to be by car, or better yet, drive the Canyonero. (No train schedule can predict when the milk runs out!)
The country is so big, and we have so much empty land, there’s just simply no room to build more stores near where people live. What kind of madness would that be?!
- Comment on Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term? 5 months ago:
Right, which is why I’ve been saying that the Democrats should restore the filibuster. What they have now is not a filibuster, in practice, it’s more akin to an administrative hold. One Senator indicates an intent to filibuster via email, and they move on to other business.
Make 'em do it. Pick a popular issue, and lean into it. Make the Republicans actually stand up there at the podium and talk for hours. Get them on camera on the news every night as obstructionists, blocking the will of the people. Yes, it will waste Senate session time; that’s a perfect opportunity for all of the Democrats to roast them non-stop to reporters. It’ll be painful for a while, but at least has a chance of breaking the log jam. (And if the GQP doesn’t take the bait, hey, popular thing gets passed!)
- Comment on It’s not impossible for someone to have heard about assguard, looked it up, and then realized it’s “Asgard”. 6 months ago:
What, do you have assburgers syndrome?
- Comment on May 13, 1985 6 months ago:
That’s possible, but that doesn’t explain the same feeling about the Ruby Ridge incident.
- Comment on May 13, 1985 6 months ago:
And yet the Waco siege is still a rallying cry for anti-government groups accusing the FBI and DEA of unjust, violent overreaction, while the MOVE bombing is not. Huh, I wonder what the difference is? /s
- Comment on May 13, 1985 6 months ago:
I see a cult with a fortified compound and armed soldiers, with multiple missed paroles and a history of armed violence going back over a decade. If they’re not terrorist then what the fuck are they?
- Comment on Phones have unique phone numbers, why dont computers have unique computer-numbers? 6 months ago:
I haven’t read all of the replies to see if somebody else had said this, but it’s because the Internet was designed to be completely decentralized, whereas the phone system requires your line or device to be registered with the network operator(s). Any device that can get a valid Internet address for the local network can communicate with the whole Internet, but a phone will only work if it’s explicitly known by the phone service provider, and that information shared to all providers.
We could set up a system, layered on top of the Internet, by which each computer could register itself in a central directory each time it connects, and thus be reachable at the same address no matter where it connects, even on a NAT connection. In fact, it’s easy to do with a VPN and Dynamic DNS (both of which require the cooperation some centralized authority). It’s just not universal, because, well, what’s the utility of doing so?
- Comment on Police at UCLA face off against left-wing mob as nationwide anti-Israel protests escalate 6 months ago:
I saw protests in my city first-hand in 2011, and Fox News reported bald-faced lies about them.
- Comment on buying coffee 8 months ago:
Yeah, saying millionaire/billionaire as a category is gibberish. You have to be a millionaire if you want to do something crazy, like, I dunno, retire comfortably when you’re 65. You have to be a billionaire, well, never. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.
- Comment on Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has replaced the Hide Desktop icon with Copilot. 8 months ago:
Now you tell me.
- Comment on Venus by Tuesday 9 months ago:
As a natural pedant, I have to point out that that’s not quite true. Decades ago, people talked about global warming (due to the greenhouse effect) because we feared that it would lead to major climate change.
Then, it led to major climate change. Now we talk about that. Global warming is still a thing, it’s just the effects have upstaged it as a topic.
- Comment on Venus by Tuesday 9 months ago:
The Xcretion says that less ice “is consistent with” a weaker jet stream, which does not imply a casual relationship. If A causes B and Y, then B is consistent with Y; or, more accurately, we can produce a useful model of the system that includes both less ice and a weaker jet stream, and have it be internally consistent.
- Comment on "YOLO" and "Memento Mori" mean pretty much the same thing 10 months ago:
It does seem like YOLO = memento mori + carpe diem.
- Comment on What's the deal with buying single cans out of a multipack at a bottle shop? (Australia) 11 months ago:
That notice is not a legal restriction, nor a rule to stop stores from breaking up multi-packs. What it’s there for is to alert buyers and cashiers that the barcode printed on each unit contains the product code for the multi-pack. If stores want to sell individual units, they just have to re-label them, or at least not scan the barcode.
The store in which I used to work sells individual bottles of beer, or build-your-own 6-packs. The liquor department manager just puts a slash through the barcodes with a black marker, so they won’t scan on the registers.
- Comment on What the hell! Let's all just go crazy! 11 months ago:
You say that, but there’s the anachronistic nautical slang “soger” for an inept or lazy sailor. It came from the soldiers assigned to British navy ships, who did not participate in the sailing of the vessel.
- Comment on Jragon 11 months ago:
We already have UTC, and nothing stopping anybody from using it to coordinate global activities.
- Comment on Pro Pain 1 year ago:
It’s a cargo platform on an extended-frame bicycle. The seat is out of frame.